Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing
In this lecture, Jina Kim will discuss her new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke UP 2025). Care at the End of the World demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. It brings a disability lens to bear on feminist, queer, and crip-of-color writing following major US welfare reform, which passed in 1996. Looking to authors such as Octavia Butler, Jesmyn Ward, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Aurora Levins Morales, Kim examines how this body of literature grapples with the disabling effects of state austerity measures and interrupts dominant narratives about who deserves care. She calls forward the critiques and possibilities in their literary representations of infrastructure, honoring the imaginative work that these writers do to envision alternative infrastructural arrangements in a world that refuses to support them.
Jina B. Kim is a scholar of feminist disability studies and queer of color critique. She is an associate professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Her new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing, demonstrates how and why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. Jina's work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, and The Asian American Literary Review.
Event Location: HIB 135
Event Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm